Metafiction

Metafiction, or fiction that reflects on the act of writing fiction, is one element of Beckett's great genius. All three novels, to some extent, reference the creation of a world through words, and reflect on the difficulties, paradoxes, and wonderment of this creation. In "Company," the process is referenced almost explicitly through the man's creation of a voice, which is a narrator for his life. This voice makes a cohesive story out of a series of random events, giving the man the sense of having lived. At the same time, the presence of the voice makes the man desire a hearer, or an audience, and thus try to create this figure as well. These two figures are implicit references to the process of writing, in which the writer uses memory to make some kind of story, and in the process, must create a reader who is both present...